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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Another reason to fear reform, the wrong reform might win and set us back further.
See, the leading candidate for election reform is currently Ranked Choice. RCV can lead to worse election outcomes than First Past the Post, and has lead to worse results in several US based elections already.
It's a deeply flawed system that, on the surface, looks like an upgrade. And when people experience the flaws first hand, it makes them not want to try actual better systems.
Want a super simple system that easily outperforms RCV and FPtP? Try Approval, It's been tried in a few US elections to good result.
If you want to be able to rank your candidate choices against each other and have it matter, try STAR, a voting system designed to be easily used and easily understood. Designed to take advantage of basic human psychology to get the best result.
The choice for the star rating to be 0-5 was very specific. Humans tend to group ratings at the edges and the middle in ranking systems. For instance, a rating system of 0-100 would see lots of 0, 1, 50, 99, 100. And that would be about all the points of the scale used. You might have one person out of a hundred who will use more, but mostly it's going to be ratings at either end of the scale, and then smack dab in the middle. So the best rating system is actually the scale of 0-5.
Anyway. STAR takes that rating, then adds them all up for each candidate, the top two move on to the second round, where each ballot is examined to see who placed higher on that ballot. You count those ballots as their vote total. You also count the ballots where they were scored evenly and release that info as a "no preference" so that the winner knows what sort of mandate they actually have.
If you want to change things up, you could also do the average in the first round. It slightly changes how the votes are counted, with ratings of 0 actively hurting a candidate, but in testing it doesn't seem to actually change the result.
Anyway, this whole tangent was about how RCV is bad, and saps political will from being able to implement actually good systems, which makes RCV even worse.
Oh, a final thought, with Approval and STAR, you can also ditch the primary elections. They can both handle more candidates natively, and perform better the more you have. RCV actually performs worse the more candidates you have, which has led to several of its failures.
Talking about different reforms, the tv show QI was talking about the best system for election... and they suggested choose someone at random from the populace. It would make bribery to get elected impossible, it'd eliminate the contentious elections, and a random selected person is likely more moral and a better leader than someone already in power now....
Not going to say it's the best system, but I wouldn't mind seeing it attempted once or twice, I do honestly believe it couldn't be worse than the current systems.